Thursday, August 06, 2009

On this Day in 1945

(reposted from August 6, 2007)

At 8:15 AM on August 6, 1945 an atomic bomb was detonated over Hiroshima, Japan. Approximately 78,000 civilians were killed on that day. Six months later the death toll had risen to about 140,000 people.

There are many arguments in favor of dropping the bomb just as there are many arguments against it. What's clear is that in the context of 2007 we are not in a good position to judge the actions of countries that had been at war for many years.

The most important lesson of Hiroshima is that war is hell and many innocent people die. It's all very well to enter into a war with the best of intentions—as the Japanese did on December 7, 1941—but it's foolish to pretend that when you start a war there won't be any suffering. When you do that you can really say that the victims of Hiroshima died in vain.

The killing and maiming of civilians is an inevitable outcome of war, no matter how hard you might try to restrict your targets to military objectives. Before going to war you need to take the consequences into account and decide whether the cost is worth it.

One of the many mistakes in Iraq was the naive assumption that it would be a clean war with few casualties and no long-term consequences for the Iraqi people. Yet today, the numbers of innocent lives lost in Iraq is comparable to the numbers lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And what is the benefit for Iraq that outweighs the cost in human lives? Is it "freedom" and "democracy"?

Hiroshima was not a glorious victory. It was ugly, heartbreaking, and avoidable. War is not an end in itself, it is the failure of peace. War is not an instrument of your foreign policy—it is an admission that you don't have a foreign policy.

[The top photograph shows the mushroom cloud over Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945 (Photo from Encyclopedia Britanica: Hiroshima: mushroom cloud over Hiroshima, 1945. [Photograph]. Retrieved August 7, 2007, from Encyclopædia Britannica Online. The bottom image is taken from a Japanese postcard (Horoshima and Nagassaki 1945). It shows victims of the attack on Hiroshima.]

13 comments
:

Can't say I'm all that well-versed on the subject of WWII. But here's one question that I've always had.

What was the rationale (if there even was one) for dropping the bombs on densely-populated civilian targets? It seems to me that the U.S. could have achieved its objectives by bombing either military targets or rural areas, as a show of force - i.e. to show that the U.S. had the technology and the will to implement it. Why deliberately seek to kill as many innocent civilians as possible?

What's key is that unlike Germany, Japan hasn't learned to maturely grasp with the legacy of the pain and suffering it inflicted on other peoples. The horrors of Dresden and RAF firebombing of German urban centers did not prevent Germany from grappling with its past crimes. The self-pity that Hiroshima generated, however, did.

Anonymous #1, there was not enough bomb grade fissionable material to make more than two bombs (after the initial test at Alamogordo).

If we were going to use them to end the war, it had to be the real thing.

That said, the university where I did my undergraduate work had several professors who were "leftovers" from the Manhattan Project. I can tell you that to a man they wrestled with the moral implications of their work at Los Alamos for the rest of their lives.

In August 1945, there were virtually no targets left undestroyed in Japan. Yet, they still refused to surrender. The war had to end.

Many of us had fathers in the Pacific Theater of Operations in 1945, and we just wanted the war to end so they could come home.

Enjoy your moral pontificating from the luxury of not having been there, or having any close personal investment in the outcome of the war.

And while you're at it, look up a little information about the Japanese rape of Nanking, and other atrocities against civilians inflicted by the Japanese.

It's a mistake to think the atomic bombs were somehow an escalation of the types of destructive warfare being carried out in that region. The firebombing attacks of highly populated cities like Tokyo, made up of mainly wooden houses, caused far more fatalities. There is a serious argument over whether the second bombing at Nagasaki was necessary. I so seriously wonder whether it was done as a show of strength to Stalins army who were rapidly approaching Japan through the Korean peninsula at that time.

Hiroshima was destroyed because the weather was good that day. Ostensibly there was a military target, same as all the other cities that were destroyed (Coventry, Dresden etc). However, the aim was clearly a form of terrorism - to increase the death toll on the home front to make people fear for their lives and so decrease support for their government.

As to whether it was a civilian target. Well, all the soldiers were conscripts and so no more deserving of death than anyone else. Once you've accepted the logic of mass killing as a war aim, it really doesn't matter who you kill. Cities are good as targets of convenience.

Hiroshima contained the headquarters for the 2nd army and marines. It was also a major supply centre for the Japanese war effort.

Nagasaki was a prime anchorage for the japanese navy and major industrial base...esp. shipbuilding and heavy weapons.

In addition to military significance, all possible targets for the new weapons were "test beds": relatively unscathed by conventional bombing, and in an urban area (easy to check destruction from aerial photos).

If Japan had to be invaded then it was estimated that millions of allied servicemen would lose their lives. I don't think Japanese casualties would have been considered (although, considering Okinawa, they would have numbered 10 times the allied casualties). So, it might be said that the nuclear attack on Japan saved lives...in the long run.

Hi Larry (et al), I have to disagree with you on one of your points, that war is not an act of foreign policy, that it is a lack there of (particularly in the context of WW2). War is the ultimate expression of foreign policy, it is the last remaining act of policy, for years acts of appeasement and isolationism did not keep us out of WW2. Glen Larson once wrote in one of his television shows that “war is not the opposite of peace; it is the opposite of slavery”. Personally, I think this is the best description of what war is really about, if you are not willing to defend your way of life, some one else will enforce theirs upon you. It really is that simple, it isn’t nice, it isn’t pretty, and it’s seldom just, especially to those caught in the middle. Some of the Islamic terrorist groups have stated that their aim is for the complete reformation of the entire world into their vision of Islam. Now, all that said, none of that is a defense of GWB, he was on the wrong end too, he wanted to Americanize the rest of the world. War is not useless, it is awesomely (denotation) useful, also maddeningly disgusting.

In "The History of E=m c-squared", David Bogdanis states that based on his research in the Eisenhower Library, the Japanese were willing to surrender prior to the bombings under one condition: that the Emperor not be punished or deposed. We would only accept unconditional surrender, and dropped the bombs to get it. Eisenhower told Secretary of War Stimpson that the U.S. should not be the first nation to use the atomic bomb, and "that old man got very angry at me." MacArthur later decided to keep the Japanese Emperor in place for stability.

Assuming that is factual, I think we were wrong to drop the bombs.

On a possibly related matter, I saw elsewhere (I think on Jerry Pournelle's blog), that celestial navigation is no longer taught in the Armed Forces because the the WWII era training films were full of references to the Japanese as sub-human gooks.

Hiroshima manufactures some of the torpedoes that destroyed Pearl Harbor.

The argument that the decision to drop the bomb was as much political as moral is a pretty convincing one. Also as someone said, the moral line had already been crossed earlier with firebombing. Truman was worried about the Soviets interfering in Japan and wanted to establish a presence there before they did. You can read Gar Alperowitz's work on this which is pretty exhaustive.

Laurence A. Moran

Larry Moran is a Professor Emeritus in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Toronto. You can contact him by looking up his email address on the University of Toronto website.

Sandwalk

The Sandwalk is the path behind the home of Charles Darwin where he used to walk every day, thinking about science. You can see the path in the woods in the upper left-hand corner of this image.

Disclaimer

Some readers of this blog may be under the impression that my personal opinions represent the official position of Canada, the Province of Ontario, the City of Toronto, the University of Toronto, the Faculty of Medicine, or the Department of Biochemistry. All of these institutions, plus every single one of my colleagues, students, friends, and relatives, want you to know that I do not speak for them. You should also know that they don't speak for me.

Subscribe to Sandwalk

Quotations

The old argument of design in nature, as given by Paley, which formerly seemed to me to be so conclusive, fails, now that the law of natural selection has been discovered. We can no longer argue that, for instance, the beautiful hinge of a bivalve shell must have been made by an intelligent being, like the hinge of a door by man. There seems to be no more design in the variability of organic beings and in the action of natural selection, than in the course which the wind blows.Charles Darwin (c1880)Although I am fully convinced of the truth of the views given in this volume, I by no means expect to convince experienced naturalists whose minds are stocked with a multitude of facts all viewed, during a long course of years, from a point of view directly opposite to mine. It is so easy to hide our ignorance under such expressions as "plan of creation," "unity of design," etc., and to think that we give an explanation when we only restate a fact. Any one whose disposition leads him to attach more weight to unexplained difficulties than to the explanation of a certain number of facts will certainly reject the theory.

Charles Darwin (1859)Science reveals where religion conceals. Where religion purports to explain, it actually resorts to tautology. To assert that "God did it" is no more than an admission of ignorance dressed deceitfully as an explanation...

Quotations

The world is not inhabited exclusively by fools, and when a subject arouses intense interest, as this one has, something other than semantics is usually at stake.
Stephen Jay Gould (1982)
I have championed contingency, and will continue to do so, because its large realm and legitimate claims have been so poorly attended by evolutionary scientists who cannot discern the beat of this different drummer while their brains and ears remain tuned to only the sounds of general theory.
Stephen Jay Gould (2002) p.1339
The essence of Darwinism lies in its claim that natural selection creates the fit. Variation is ubiquitous and random in direction. It supplies raw material only. Natural selection directs the course of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1977)
Rudyard Kipling asked how the leopard got its spots, the rhino its wrinkled skin. He called his answers "just-so stories." When evolutionists try to explain form and behavior, they also tell just-so stories—and the agent is natural selection. Virtuosity in invention replaces testability as the criterion for acceptance.
Stephen Jay Gould (1980)
Since 'change of gene frequencies in populations' is the 'official' definition of evolution, randomness has transgressed Darwin's border and asserted itself as an agent of evolutionary change.
Stephen Jay Gould (1983) p.335
The first commandment for all versions of NOMA might be summarized by stating: "Thou shalt not mix the magisteria by claiming that God directly ordains important events in the history of nature by special interference knowable only through revelation and not accessible to science." In common parlance, we refer to such special interference as "miracle"—operationally defined as a unique and temporary suspension of natural law to reorder the facts of nature by divine fiat.
Stephen Jay Gould (1999) p.84

Quotations

My own view is that conclusions about the evolution of human behavior should be based on research at least as rigorous as that used in studying nonhuman animals. And if you read the animal behavior journals, you'll see that this requirement sets the bar pretty high, so that many assertions about evolutionary psychology sink without a trace.

Jerry Coyne
Why Evolution Is TrueI once made the remark that two things disappeared in 1990: one was communism, the other was biochemistry and that only one of them should be allowed to come back.

Sydney Brenner
TIBS Dec. 2000
It is naïve to think that if a species' environment changes the species must adapt or else become extinct.... Just as a changed environment need not set in motion selection for new adaptations, new adaptations may evolve in an unchanging environment if new mutations arise that are superior to any pre-existing variations

Douglas Futuyma
One of the most frightening things in the Western world, and in this country in particular, is the number of people who believe in things that are scientifically false. If someone tells me that the earth is less than 10,000 years old, in my opinion he should see a psychiatrist.

Francis Crick
There will be no difficulty in computers being adapted to biology. There will be luddites. But they will be buried.

Sydney Brenner
An atheist before Darwin could have said, following Hume: 'I have no explanation for complex biological design. All I know is that God isn't a good explanation, so we must wait and hope that somebody comes up with a better one.' I can't help feeling that such a position, though logically sound, would have left one feeling pretty unsatisfied, and that although atheism might have been logically tenable before Darwin, Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist

Richard Dawkins
Another curious aspect of the theory of evolution is that everybody thinks he understand it. I mean philosophers, social scientists, and so on. While in fact very few people understand it, actually as it stands, even as it stood when Darwin expressed it, and even less as we now may be able to understand it in biology.

Jacques Monod
The false view of evolution as a process of global optimizing has been applied literally by engineers who, taken in by a mistaken metaphor, have attempted to find globally optimal solutions to design problems by writing programs that model evolution by natural selection.